Did Karzai Sabotage Peace Talks in Afghanistan?

By Dominic Tierney

The U.S. was holding secret negotiations with the Taliban--until Afghanistan's president told the world they were happening

Reuters

Reports that the Afghan government deliberately
undermined U.S. negotiations with the Taliban suggest that the path to peace in
Afghanistan requires navigating between the Scylla of a hostile enemy and the
Charybdis of truculent allies.

According to the Associated Press, the United States
held a series of secret peace talks with the Taliban in 2010 and 2011. The
negotiations were apparently making progress before they were undermined by an
act of deliberate sabotage. Officials close to Hamid Karzai publicly leaked the
talks for fear that the Afghan president would be sidelined. The discussions
then collapsed and the Taliban negotiator fled into hiding--where he hasn't been
heard from for months.

the talks have stalled is completely wrong
according to my well-informed sources, who insist that they are continuing
despite leaks to the press, as well as threats to the security of the
participants and other problems.

Whatever the precise status of the current discussions,
the episode reveals that negotiating peace is not simply a matter of bargaining
with the enemy: keeping friends on board can be an even greater challenge.
Wartime alliances resemble a group of prisoners bound together in a chain
gang. If one prisoner marches toward the horizon, another may dig his heels in
and bring the whole expedition to a shuddering halt.

In both of America's bloodiest wars after 1945--the Korean
War and the Vietnam War--U.S. allies tried to sabotage a peace deal parlayed by
Washington.

The U.S. spent the last two years of the Korean War, from
1951-1953, negotiating an armistice with the enemy, even while thousands of
Americans, Koreans and Chinese continued to die. But U.S. ally and South Korean
president Syngman Rhee was a fierce critic of the peace talks and opposed any
agreement that left Korea divided. In 1953, when a truce agreement was in
sight, Rhee jeopardized the settlement by organizing public demonstrations
against a deal and threatening to continue the war on his own.

In the fall of 1972, the outlines of a settlement were in
place to end the Vietnam War--or, more accurately, to end U.S. involvement in
Vietnam. But like Rhee before him, South Vietnam leader Nguyen Van Thieu was
deeply skeptical about talks and was outraged with the draft peace settlement.
He publicly released an altered version of the deal that made the terms appear
even worse than they actually were.

In both Korea and Vietnam, massive U.S. pressure and the
full panoply of carrots and sticks were required to win Rhee and Thieu's
acquiescence to a deal--and keep the chain gang in lockstep.

Maintaining alliances in Afghanistan while negotiating
peace may be even trickier. For one thing, the war is extremely complex with
multiple actors pursuing their own agendas. One member of Karzai's High Peace
Council commented that: "all the key players...are holding separate and secret
talks with their own contacts within the insurgency." With so many cooks, the
broth may easily be spoiled.

And there is another reason to worry. The Karzai faction
is actually one of the stronger advocates of negotiating with the Taliban--and
yet they still sabotaged the discussions.

Other members of America's chain gang are more reluctant
to stride toward peace talks. The so-called Northern Alliance, or the
non-Pashtun northern groups that helped the United States topple the Taliban
back in 2001, are opposed to bringing the Taliban into government--or even
negotiating at all.

Amrullah Saleh resigned from the Afghan government in protest at reconciliation with the Taliban, and led a rally of 10,000 in Kabul against a deal--his "anti-Taliban constituency." Saleh hinted that any peace deal might be followed by the re-mobilization of northern forces: "Don't push me to take a gun."